696 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



laborious. Hence, envious minds have not let tlie opportunity 

 pass to reproach him with having made himself unintelligible in 

 order to appear profound. The reason of this is, that Gauss does 

 not leave visible any trace of the analytical course by which he 

 has been led to the final solution. He used to say that when a 

 monument is exhibited to the public there should remain no 

 traces of the scaffoldings that have been used in constructing it. 

 He was wrong in this; for, although it may be true that the 

 scaffoldings ought to be withdrawn from the eye of the public, 

 they should be for a certain time accessible to those of architects ; 

 and, even if they are out of use, they are sometimes the object 

 of special descriptions, which make their merit understood. . . . 

 Although Gauss is hard to understand as a writer, he was very 

 clear as a professor. He was not, however, one of those mathe- 

 maticians who are represented as being so deeply buried in their 

 science as to have become strangers to the outer world. He used 

 to talk pertinently and agreeably on subjects of philosophy, poli- 

 tics, and literature." 



The charge of obscurity here brought against Gauss is re- 

 viewed by Prof. H. J. S. Smith, who says : " It may seem para- 

 doxical, but it is probably nevertheless true, that it is precisely 

 the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered 

 the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and un- 

 necessary difficulty. The fact is, that there is neither obscurity 

 nor difficulty in his writings, so long as we read them in the sub- 

 missive spirit in which an intelligent school-boy is made to read 

 his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the 

 assertions succeed one another in a joerfectly just analogical order ; 

 there is nothing, so far, of which we can complain. But, when we 

 have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is bui 

 begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, 

 and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil, and is as yet 

 concealed from us. . . . No vestige appears of the process by which 

 the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the 

 considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demon- 

 stration." 



According to M. Wagener, as summarized by Prof. Tucker, 

 though Gauss looked upon mathematics as the principal means 

 for developing human knowledge, he yet fully recognized the 

 beneficial influence of an acquaintance with classical literature. 

 He had, indeed, a wonderful faculty for the acquisition of lan- 

 guages ; he was acquainted with most of the European languages, 

 and could speak many of them well. At the age of sixty -two he 

 took up the study of the Russian language, and he mastered it in 

 two years. He took a great interest in politics till within a few 

 weeks of his death. " His lectures, in which he adopted the ana- 



